Hot Topics:

SALUTE TO WOMEN: Doris Kirkpatrick

Fitchburg writer remembered for books on the city's history

Sentinel & Enterprise

Updated:
07/31/2013 10:38:02 AM EDT

Doris Kirkpatrick, right, chats with Barbara Cushing Crocker and Thomas Boylston Adams, then-president of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Adams wrote the introduction to Kirkpatrick's history of Fitchburg, "The City and the River." COURTESY FITCHBURG HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Doris Kirkpatrick (1902-1984) was born and raised in Fitchburg, although her parents, Bradford and Flora Smith Upton, were natives of Vermont and owned a home in Whitingham.

The Uptons came to Fitchburg so Doris' father could work as a railroad engineer. She grew up on Day Street and graduated from Fitchburg High School. Doris earned her undergraduate degree at Middlebury College, where she wrote poetry and edited the college magazine. She did graduate studies in social work at the University of Chicago where she also worked for the Juvenile Court.

After their marriage, Doris and her husband, Clifford Kirkpatrick, moved to Philadelphia where Doris wrote book reviews for a local newspaper. In 1938, while Clifford was studying in Germany, Doris met and interviewed Frau Gertrude Scholtz-Klink, the head of the Nazi Women's League. She was the first American to gain an interview with Frau Klink, and her story was published in the New York Times.

In Fitchburg, Doris is best remembered as the author of "The City and the River" (1971) and "Around the World in Fitchburg" (1975), two major volumes that help to tell the stories of the history of the city. Doris wrote the histories for the young people of Fitchburg, hoping the books would encourage them to research and study Fitchburg history. In 1976, Doris received an honorary degree of doctor of letters from Fitchburg State College in recognition of her work as a poetess, dramatist, journalist and Fitchburg historian.

Advertisement

Doris was frequently asked to write selections for anniversary celebrations in the community. In 1959, she wrote "The Bookseller Sets the Clock Ahead" as a dramatic reading for the Fitchburg Public Library's 100th anniversary. In 1964, when the city was celebrating its 200th anniversary, Doris wrote the script for the pageant, "This Land Was Made for You and Me." She and her friend Barbara Cushing Crocker also researched and wrote the "Wide Dorre of Libertie" for the 200th anniversary of the First Parish Church.

While Doris was a freelance writer for most of her life, she did spend 13 years in the Fitchburg office of the Worcester Telegram beginning in 1945. She earned five Associated Press awards, one for an article about the Skyline Engineers' restoration of the Rollstone Congregational Church steeple, which she climbed!

Doris, who had retained the family home in Whitingham, and loved to relate stories about the difficult winters there, went to Whitingham and wrote a novel titled "Honey in the Rock," which was published in 1976. Her novel was based on what it is like to live on a 200-year-old Vermont farm. Doris had a daughter, Judy, and two grandchildren. She died in Vermont in August 1984.